Sharpe turned. 'I have taken over command of this Battalion as of this evening. The senior captain is now Mr d'Alembord. The head of this Mess is Regimental Sergeant Major Harper. As you are aware, the Sergeant Major and I had to use unusual methods to find you. Whatever happened to myself and the RSM in this place is now forgotten. It is over. There will be no recriminations for anything that happened to us, no punishments, nothing.'
They stared at him, surprised by the leniency. 'So listen to me. I know what has been happening here. The army knows. Every one of you, every single one of you has earned a prison sentence or worse.' He was making it up as he went along, but their submission told him that he was on target. 'But the army, in its wisdom, is not going to pursue charges, not if you bastards now do as you are told and do it well!' Not one of them moved. The last rays of the sun slashed through the drifting dust in the air.
'There will be no more selling of recruits. We're marching to Chelmsford tomorrow. We're going, eventually, to Spain. I'm leaving you miserable bastards in your present ranks, and I expect you to earn that trust! You are accountable to the Regimental Sergeant Major and if any of you do not like that, then I suggest you take it up with Sergeant Major Harper personally. I can tell you from personal experience that he has no objections to settling quarrels in private.'
Harper kept his rigid pose, but slowly, very slowly, a smile appeared on his face. No one smiled back.
Sharpe was nearly through with them. 'I assume that all of you remember how real sergeants behave? That is how you will behave. There will be no punishments except those sanctioned by your Company officer, or the officer of the day, or by myself, and all such punishments will be recorded in the Battalion book. And if I discover any one of you trying to get round that order, I will punish that man myself, in private, and alone, and without entering it into the book. Two last things.' He did not raise his voice, and only Harper knew how desperately Sharpe meant these final words. 'If any man out of any of your Companies deserts on tomorrow's march, I will punish you for that desertion. There will be march orders in three hours; be ready for them. And one last thing.' There was a small stir as they looked up at him. So far, beyond insults that they deserved, he had not been harsh.
His face was full of disdain. 'If any of you are frightened of going to Spain and wish to stay with a properly constituted Second Battalion, give your name to the RSM. On your feet!' He waited till they were standing. 'Good evening.'
He left, stopping only to mutter a question to Harper. 'Any sign of Charlie?'
'Nothing, sir.'
'Don't wait if he has news. Just find me.'
'Yes, sir.'
Sharpe crossed to the office and there he gave much the same to the officers, though he also offered them a chance to resign their commissions this very night if they so wished. 'Just don't be here in the morning, you understand?'
There was silence. There were the two Captains; Smith the senior man, and Finch the junior, with six Lieutenants. They all looked old for their rank, and Sharpe supposed that Girdwood had hand-picked each of them. Doubtless they were filled with resentment against an army that had let younger men be promoted over them, that had even allowed a man from the ranks, Richard Sharpe, to be a Major. He was equally sure, though he did not yet have any proof, that their rancour had been assuaged by generous payments from the profits of Foulness.
'I know what this place is." Not one of them, just like the sergeants, would catch his eye. 'You're bloody crimpers! Hardly a gentleman's trade, is it? And thieves.'
Captain Finch, his head still bandaged from the thump Harper had given him with his pistol butt, looked angrily at Sharpe, but the Rifleman stared him down. 'I had to find this place by bloody joining up! And what do I find? Thieves masquerading as gentlemen. Common bloody criminals. You! Captain Smith?'
'Sir?' Captain Hamish Smith, five years older than Sharpe and with prematurely grey hair and sunken cheeks, looked timidly at the Rifleman.
'Where's the Battalion chest?'
'In that cupboard, sir.'
'Open it.'
'The chest is locked, sir. Colonel has the key.'
Sharpe took his rifle. They watched in silence as, with the practised, quick efficiency of a trained Rifleman, he loaded the gun. When the rifle was primed, he opened the cupboard, dragging the great, padlocked chest onto the floor, and held the muzzle against the steel padlock.
They flinched as the bullet ripped the hasp away from the chest with a burst of splinters and a shrieking of torn metal. 'You! Tell me your name again.' Sharpe pointed to a tall, long-faced Lieutenant who had been guarding the bridge when Sharpe arrived and who still looked shocked from the savage words that had answered his challenge there.
'Mattingley, sir.'
'Count the contents.'
Sharpe had kicked the lid open. He could see bags of coin and a pile of banknotes, but he could see no ledgers or papers. Lieutenant Price, in his search of this office, had likewise found no incriminating documents. The only proof Sharpe had, at this moment, of Sir Henry Simmerson and Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's illegalities was the Battalion itself. The proof he so desperately needed was not here, and he prayed that d'Alembord would find it in Girdwood's quarters.
He gave the orders for the next day as Mattingley counted the money. When the orders were given, he stared at each man in turn. 'I will say one last thing. I do not know, nor do I much care, whether the army will punish your thievery and crimping. I do know this. The attitude of the Horse Guards will be much affected by the behaviour of this Mess over the next few days.' The truth was that he could not control the Battalion without these men or the sergeants, and, though he despised them and would have gladly seen each one broken and dismissed, he needed them. 'My object, gentlemen, is simple. I wish our Regiment to be part of the invasion of France. It is to that purpose that I am here, and if you help me in that purpose then I will do what I can to ensure your own personal survival.' He looked at Mattingley. 'How much?'
'Two hundred and four guineas in coin, sir. Forty-eight pounds in note.'
'This room will be locked and guarded tonight. If I find anything missing, any papers, any money, then I will know who to question. Captain Smith? I'll trouble you to stay here. The rest of you gentlemen are dismissed.'
He watched them file from the door. d'Alembord waited outside and Sharpe gestured for him to enter. 'Anything?'
'Nothing, sir.' d'Alembord had searched Girdwood's quarters, even those of his servant. 'Except some poetry.' He grinned, and it was a relief to Sharpe, after the last half hour, to hear an honest voice with humour in it.
'Poetry?'
'He's written reams of it, sir, very much of the drums of battle variety. The word rattle comes in frequently as a convenient rhyme,' d'Alembord smiled. 'But no papers. He's also given his word that he won't leave his quarters tonight.'
'But no papers, Dally?'
d'Alembord smiled sympathetically at Sharpe's disappointment. 'I fear not, sir.'
So Sharpe was still without written proof. He swore softly, told d'Alembord to sit, then, with Smith's help, went through Girdwood's charts and training records to determine which men were ready for battle, and which not. That news, at least, was satisfying. Two hundred and forty-three men, including the two guard Companies, were either fully, or close to being fully trained. d'Alembord smiled. 'It's enough, sir.'
'More than.' Sharpe rubbed his eyes. He had stayed too late in Vauxhall Gardens, and had had small sleep. 'I want those guard Companies broken up in the morning, Dally.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Form the trained men into four Companies. The rest stay in their squads. You take one Company, Harry another.' He paused. He needed two more Company commanders. 'What are those lads at Chelmsford like, Dally?'
'Carline might do.' d'Alembord said it grudgingly. 'Merrill and Pierce are bloody milksops.'
'We'll give Carline one Company, the other will have to wait.'
'Yes, sir.'
&
nbsp; Sharpe saw the pathetic eagerness on Captain Smith's face to be given the fourth Company. He ignored it for the moment, drawing to him, instead, the great piles of attestation forms that Price had discovered in this office. There was one for each man and, just as when Sharpe had made his mark on one of these forms in Sleaford, none of them had the name of the Regiment filled in. 'Dally. Find some clerks. Put the First Battalion, South Essex, on every god-damned form. And lose O'Keefe and Vaughn from the pile, will you?'
d'Alembord looked at the huge pile, and nodded. He knew how important the task was. Once at Chelmsford the Battalion was still not safe from Lord Fenner, but if these forms, above a magistrate's signature, stated that the men were part of the First Battalion, then they would constitute some kind of proof that the men existed and might confuse whichever officer tried to march away the Second Battalion. Sharpe would guard these forms well, staying with them until his proof had reached Lady Camoynes in London. If the proof ever came.
d'Alembord left with the attestations and Sharpe stood up. He paced up and down the floor, watching the grey-haired captain who sat miserable and ashamed in one of Girdwood's stiff chairs. He was also, Sharpe could see, eager to please his new master.
'How much money, Smith, did Girdwood fetch for each man?'
Hamish Smith blushed. He spoke reluctantly. 'Fifty pounds.'
'That's what I thought.' Sharpe did not betray the sudden relief he felt because that answer was the first direct proof he had that the Battalion had been crimping. He had Jane Gibbons' word, and that of Lady Camoynes, but Smith was the first man of the Battalion to confirm it.
'Of course it varied.' Smith was rubbing his hands together, twining his fingers, fidgeting unhappily. 'Some auctions were more profitable.'
'Who bought them?'
'Foreign postings,' Smith shrugged. 'West Indies mostly, some in Africa.'
That made sense. The regiments posted to the West Indies lost far more men than the regiments in Spain, most of them to the dreaded yellow fever. Recruits were hard, almost impossible to find, and by selling men to such regiments Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood had made sure that the evidence of his peculation was carried far away to an early grave.
Smith looked sheepishly up at Sharpe. 'I'm sorry, sir.'
'You're sorry! Christ Almighty! What about the men you've sent abroad!' There was no answer. 'Why did you do it?'
Smith paused, then the words tumbled out. He had been a Lieutenant, passed over for promotion, in debt, unable to buy a Captaincy, and, seemingly like a gift from heaven, Girdwood had offered this chance. Smith, like Finch, had bought his Captaincy and paid off the debt with the crimping profits. He looked up at Sharpe. 'I've been a soldier for twenty-four years, sir!'
Sharpe knew that desperation. He had felt it himself. He had struggled to be made a Captain, and only fortuitous interference by the Prince of Wales had afterwards made him a Major. For a man without money, promotion was hard, and if that same man, like Smith, was not serving in a fighting Battalion where dead mens' shoes created vacancies, it was virtually impossible. Bartholomew Girdwood had offered another way, offered all these men a rise in rank so that their pensions would be higher and their futures more secure.
Smith dropped his eyes. 'What does happen to us, sir?'
'Nothing. Not if you do as I tell you.' Sharpe wondered what Smith would think if he knew that Sharpe had no orders to be here, that every order from now on was unsanctioned by the army, that Sharpe was, quite literally, stealing this Battalion. 'So where are the records, Smith?'
'Don't know, sir. The Colonel kept them.'
'He's getting married, I hear?'
'Yes, sir.' Captain Smith smiled shyly. 'He doesn't like her dog.'
'Perhaps he won't have to live with it now. After this.'
Smith nodded slowly. 'No, sir. I suppose not.'
Sharpe wondered if Jane Gibbons had given, even reluctantly and under duress, her approval to the marriage. Perhaps, unless Girdwood was disgraced, she thought the marriage inescapable, and again Sharpe wondered where the proof for that disgrace would be found. 'He writes poetry, does he?'
'About war, sir. When he's drunk he reads it aloud.'
'Christ,' Sharpe laughed. 'So what did you do with the bounty money?'
Smith, who had been relaxing as Sharpe's mood turned affable, suddenly frowned. 'That was ours, sir, and the sergeants'.'
'And I suppose no man ever got paid here?'
'Only the guard Companies, sir.'
Sharpe looked at the charts on the desk. 'So, not counting the guard Companies, you've got four hundred and eighty-three men?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Then they'd better get some pay tomorrow, hadn't they?' He kicked the Battalion chest. 'Five shillings each. Not much, is it?' And that, he thought, would take nearly half of the money in the chest.
'They'll run, sir,' Smith said.
'No, they won't.' Sharpe said it firmly, though he hardly believed it. These men had been ill-treated, and, given money and the open road, there would be a strong temptation for them to flee at the first opportunity. 'You lead men, Smith, you don't drive them. And if you find yourself on a battlefield with those men, you'll need them. They aren't filth, Smith, they're soldiers, and they make the best god-damned infantry in the world.'
'Yes, sir.' Smith said it humbly and made Sharpe feel pompous.
'I want a list of the sergeants by morning. Who's good, who's bad, who's useless.'
'Yes, sir.'
'We just get them safely to Chelmsford where they belong, that's all.' It was not all. Sharpe wondered how he was to protect these men if he did not receive written proof that he could send to London. In two or three days, he knew, he might have all hell itself descend on the Chelmsford barracks. He needed the records of the auctions.
The door opened suddenly, without any knock, and Patrick Harper burst into the room with an excited look on his face. He saw Captain Smith and, thinking that Sharpe would not want this news spread about the camp, dropped into Spanish. 'The lad's come back, señor. He's travelling.' He grinned.
Sharpe picked up his shako and rifle. It was oddly pleasant to hear Spanish again, and he replied in the same language. 'On foot or horse?'
'Horse.'
Which all meant that Charlie Weller, placed as a hidden sentry to watch Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's quarters, had reported that the Colonel had broken his word and fled. Sharpe had expected it.
Sharpe switched back to English. 'I want a guard on this room, Sergeant Major. No one is to enter without my permission. No one.'
'I understand, sir.'
The officers waited outside, as though they had feared that Captain Smith, left alone with Sharpe, might be eaten alive. Sharpe, as he reloaded his rifle and waited for his horse to be brought, advised them to get some sleep. 'Unless you're leaving us, gentlemen?'
No one replied. They watched as he mounted, as he wheeled the horse, and as he rode into the night. Captain Smith, who had left his shako in the office, thought to order the door open, but one look at the huge, respectful Irish RSM, who carried eight loaded bullets in his two guns, persuaded Smith that this night, and perhaps in all the army nights to come, it would be better to obey orders. He walked away.
While Sharpe, sword at his side and rifle on his shoulder, galloped after his enemy who would lead him, he suspected, towards the house with the eagle weathervane, where a girl of mischievous beauty lived, and a house which, as Sharpe had guessed ever since the search of the office had proved barren, would hold the papers he needed to destroy his enemies.
Chapter 16
It was a night like the one on which he and Harper had escaped. There was the same sheen of moonlight on the marshes that turned the grasses and reeds into a shimmering, metallic silver. On the flat stretches of water that flooded the mudbanks at the creek mouths, Sharpe could see the black shapes of waterfowl. From far off, where the rising tide raced over the long mudbanks of the shore, there came, like a distant battle
dimly heard, the sound of seething water. Once, as he put his horse to an earthern bank that dyked farmland from the marsh, he saw the white, fretting line of waves far to the east, and, beyond it, a dark shape in the night that was a moored ship waiting for the ebb. A tiny spark of light showed at its stern.
Sharpe rode cautiously. He could see the small figure of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood ahead of him, and Sharpe slowed to make sure that the Colonel did not realise he was being followed. At the place where the track went north Girdwood turned, confirming Sharpe's suspicion that he was going to Sir Henry's house. Sharpe waited until the horseman had melded into the far shadows of the night, then followed.
He splashed through the Roach ford. He seemed alone now in a wet land, but behind him he could see the flicker of lights where the Foulness Camp lay, while, ahead of him, Sir Henry's house was a dark shape spotted with brilliant candlelight. Sharpe paused again beyond the Roach, standing his horse beside a tall bed of reeds and he heard, distinct over the flat, still land, the sound of big iron gates being pulled open. When he heard them close, and knew that Girdwood was safe inside the sheltering garden wall, he put his heels back and went on.
Sharpe rode to the right of the house, following the route he and Harper had taken three nights before. Hidden from the house by its front garden wall he dismounted, led the horse down into the creek bed, hobbled it, then went on foot down the sucking, muddy creek. The rising tide had half-filled the channel, forcing Sharpe to one side. He could smell the rotting vegetation that his squad had grubbed up under Sergeant Lynch's command.
The boathouse was locked again, but it was a simple matter to use the bars of the gate as a ladder. Sharpe, his rifle on his shoulder, pulled himself up to the arch's summit, peered over the top to see the east lawn deserted, then rolled onto the grass. He stayed there, a shadow at the lawn's edge, listening for guard dogs. He could hear none. The tall windows which opened onto the banked terrace above the lawn were lit, their candlelight rivalled by the moon which showed every detail of the house in black and silver.
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